Yes, I will be there.  With bells (and a deep purple velvet gown glvalentine made me buy at Second Time Around right before ICFA) on.  Not really doing much of anything but hanging out at the bar and chewing my (deep purple) nails and seeing the sights at the Smithsonian and the Library of Congress in the company of ellen_kushner and possibly lareinenoire (if she can take the time off from grading papers).  But I will certainly be at the following events:

- Friday, 5:30-7:00pm: Book Signing.

- Friday, 9:00-11:00pm: Reception! 

- Saturday, 6:30pm-10:00pm: The Nebula Reception, Banquet, and Awards. I enjoy these things so much more when I don't have, er, a dog in the fight?  Skin in the game?  A book nominated?  Yes, that's it.  I'm figuring I haven't a prayer, with so many wonderfully strong contenders in the line-up, but my nerves haven't quite got the memo.  Still, win or lose, thanks to Genevieve, I have a great dress to do it in. 

Which brings us to Sunday.  We already had plans for the evening, but when Ellen's Uncle Ron said he had an extra ticket to Gentlemen Prefer Blondes at Encores! (1) I jumped at the chance  I'm slightly more enthusiastic about musicals than Ellen and the Times had given it (and Megan Hilty, who played Ivy on Smash, and plays Lorelei Lee here) a glowing review, so I went.

And I'm glad I did.  I saw the movie with Marilyn Monroe, approximately a million years ago, and remember being mesmerized by the glowing innocence she brought to everything she did.  But I didn't remember what actually happens.  Or (with the exception of the iconic "Diamonds Are A Girl's Best Friend") any of the music.  So I was happily ignorant of what to expect.  Except a truly professional production (which I got), and some great performances (ditto).  Jules Styne and Leo Robin aren't exactly Cole Porter or Stephen Sondheim, but they deliver catchy tunes (I liked "I'm Just A Little Girl From Little Rock") and some clever lyrics (the funny better than the romantic, for my money).  By the time we saw it, all the principals had put down the scripts Encore! actors customarily carry through the whole show (since they've only had a week to learn it, and have a lot of blocking and dance moves to remember), and were doing the whole thing from memory.  The dances are spectacular, the costumes remarkably posh for what is supposed to be a semi-staged reading, and the performances polished, energetic, and engaged--especially Megan Hilty, whose Lorelei Lee falls somewhere between her Amy on Smash (2) and what I imagine her Glinda must have been like in Wicked:  ruthless but with a core of genuine sweetness, hard because she needs to be. 

In short, I had a good time.  But I came out of the theater feeling, well, uncomfortable.

Moving right along (as did we).

On Saturday (Could that be right?  *checks calendar*  Yes, Saturday.) we ate at the chi-chi Central Park South eatery Sarabeth's with friends, then took a walk in Central Park, with stops at the Dairy (which is now a purveyor of tourist tat, maps for the lost, and books for the interested) and the Carousel.  Having determined that unaccompanied adults were indeed allowed to indulge in a ride on one of their beautifully repainted and spirited steeds, all four of us (one with a bad hip, one with bad knees) climbed aboard and spun up and down and round and round to the tinny strains of "Someday Soon" and other tunes of a similar vintage.  Which Ellen and I sang along to while our friends laughed uproariously.  The air was warm and fragrant with orange blossom, the sun was shining with all its might, the green of the new grass and leaves was gloriously blinding and tender.  And what do we do?  We skibble off to the Classic Stage Company on E. 12th Street to meet Liz Gorinsky, who had two extra tickets to their production of A Midsummer Night's Dream.

And you know, I'm not sorry we did.

The Classic Stage Company is where we saw our beloved Venus In Fur last year--twice--and The Iron Age, and (about a million years ago, before I started writing reviews) Tony Kushner's Illusion.  What they do is always spare, always fresh, always interesting--even when it doesn't work.  Their Midsummer Night's Dream does work, very well indeed.  It's like Circus meets pantomime, updated to the day before yesterday, with Hermia and Helena as a matched set of Long Island rich girls (one blonde, one brunette) in sky-high heels and tight little dresses and Lysander and Demetrius as interchangeable Preppie frat boys in head-to-toe Brooks Brothers.  The fairies are clowns, with beards and skirts and corsets and glitter distributed among their costumes with a fine disregard for gender and color sense.  Puck, as played by Taylor Mac is the gender-bendiest of them all, tall, supple, irreverent, his costume varying from stripy clown to Alice in Wonderland drag to Green Man to something that looked as if it had been made out of skinned pink plush elephants, all flapping cartoon ears and stuffed trunks, including one, diamante, bouncing you-know-where.  A bit distracting, but he made it work for him.  And work.  And work.  He, and the gloriously unsubtle Bottom of Steven Skybell (who I remember fondly from his ART days), put me strongly in mind of the iconic Peter Brooke Dream, which I saw in 1970.  They have the same delight in the language, the same firm knowledge that these fairies aren't wifty and ethereal, but robust, earthy, tricksy, creatures of lightning and darkness and thunderstorm as well as moonlight and flowers, playful and scary in the way clowns are scary, in that you don't know what they might do next.

It wasn't perfect.  Ellen and I agreed that the Pyramus and Thisbe play was dull--a series of bad-performance in-jokes that clearly tickled the actors, but left us, at least, cold.  One lady in the front row of the center section, who nearly fell out of her seat laughing, would certainly disagree.  And, try as I might, I cannot warm to David Greenspan's mannered, unvarying execution of whatever part he is called upon to play.  He clearly works his ears off, and is game for any costume or stage direction, however strange or athletic.  But he's always David Greenspan, working his ears off; I prefer actors who disappear into their parts.  Like Skybell.  Like Christina Ricci, come to that, who does a dandy job with Hermia, and Bebe Neuwirth, whose dominatrix Hippolyta is super-pissed off at Theseus in the first act, and who thaws, not only beautifully, but believably, at the end.  And I don't know who Anthony Heald is, but his Theseus is a real C.E.O of a major corporation who falls in love with a queen, who learns (off stage, of course) to court rather than try and dominate her, and wins her heart.  I loved their Titania and Oberon, too--true wild things who do what they do because they want to do it, wild, unpredictable, and unreliable, but beautiful all the same.

As is this play.  As is, finally, this production.

Rose Lemberg's wonderful anthology of Feminist Speculative Poetry, The Moment of Change , Has Been Published! [A Tucket sounds!]  It contains poems by most of the best poets in the current crop of extraordinary young poets, including our very own tithenai, sovay, yuki_onna, csecooney, bluejo, shweta_narayan, nisi_la, and nineweaving.  Also Theodora Goss and Vandana Singh.  And me, who amn't strictly speaking a poet, (or young, come to that) but who commits verse now and again.  It is, in fact, a TOC of Goddesses, and you must go out RIGHT THIS MINUTE and order it.

But first, look at the pretty cover, by Terri Windling:

It never rains but it pours.  In this case, plays.  We notice that things are about to close, or friends suggest something they'd like to see, then somebody offers an extra ticket, and what do we say?  "Sorry, we're going out a lot this week, we've got work to do?"  Nooooo.  We say, "Yes, please; we'd love to."  And we do.  That adds up to five this week--counting today.

First up was February House at the Public Theater.  This was a double-date with new friends, who love the theater as much as we do.  I knew it was a musical, and that it was about a boarding house in Brooklyn in 1940 where a bunch of musicians and writers lived, but that's it.  I love the Public and I love not knowing what I'm in for, so all systems were go for a pleasant evening.  And that's what I got--and maybe a little bit more besides. 

February House is a musical in the tradition of late Sondheim and plays like Light in the Piazza rather than Gypsy or Carousel.  There's nothing like a production number, no dancing (except a little light ballroom during a rent party), no chorus, a tiny cast, no lead, ingenue, antagonist, second lead, or clown figure.  There's not even, strictly speaking, a protagonist, since the focus of the play shifts from character to character depending on what's going on in the world and in their intertwined lives.  Insofar as there is a center to the play, it's George Davis (played by Julian Fleisher), who opened the down-at-heels February House in 1940 as a kind of artistic flophouse, and whose "writer's menagerie" included Carson McCullers, W.H. Auden and his lover Chester Kallman, Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears, Erika Mann (Thomas Mann's activist daughter), and Gypsy Rose Lee, who wrote The G-String Murders there.  What he wanted to create was a safe haven for the rum, the gay, the unsure, and the dispossessed, a family that would accept same-sex love and weather artistic tantrums and foster new and wonderful novels, plays, operas, poems, and relationships.  In a limited way, he succeeded--the limitation being the twin realities of WWII and the abject poverty of everybody involved in the project, which often set leaking roofs, broken furnaces, skimpy dinners, cut-off telephones, and bedbugs between the artists and any hope of creating their art.  But before the experiment falls apart, a great deal manages to get said, entertainingly, about growing up different, about love, about the political and the personal, about what makes a family, and about the ways in which artists are and are not just like everybody else.

All this unfolds over two very long acts.  It's worth saying that I noticed how long they were (especially Act I) because my butt got numb rather than because I was bored.  I wasn't.  The dialogue was clever, the speeches and situations moved fast and neatly.   There is no actual plot, although each character has something like a psychological arc, delivered mostly in individual ballads.  The communal life of the boarding house is traced in wonderful ensemble pieces (I've lost the song-list, sadly--it wasn't printed in the program) full of clever lyrics and some very clever staging.  I was particularly impressed by the music, which sounds more modern classical than pop, shading into quotations from Britten (Ellen said--I don't know this music well enough to know) and other mid-century modernist composers without ever going full-on 12-tone (except for comic effect).  Gypsy Rose Lee's burlesque hymn to intelligent men is a total delight, as is Britten and Pear's duet on the subject of bed bugs.  The singing was assured, nuanced, and totally unmiked, which I appreciated, even though it meant I missed a few words of lyric.

OK, I have to leave now, so I can go see two (!) more plays:  Gentlemen Prefer Blonds with Ellen's Uncle Ron and Fabulation of the Re-Education of Undine in Brooklyn.  Don't know when I'll catch up--we're leaving for WisCon on Thursday.  But I'll make notes and do my best, because everything I've seen makes me want to share.

Hoo boy.  Here come the sexbots.  But, really, that's the name of the play.  And there's a big old rooster on the Playbill to underscore its central (if unexpressed) conceit:  that love relationships are as much like cock fights as they are like anything else, and that, in the end, even the winning cock is nearly as bloody and damaged as the loser he's vanquished.

I went into this play knowing less than usual about what I was going to see.  Ellen said she'd like to see it, I said "Sure, why not?" and went back to finishing the latest draft of my WIP.  I think she said there were gay men involved (which didn't actually astonish me), and that it had been at the Royal Court Theater in London, where we saw The Libertine many years ago.  I didn't expect to like it; I didn't expect not to.  I don't know anything about Mike Bartlett, the playwright.  I was, in fact, a tabula rasa.

The set told me something.  The Duke has set up the whole theater as a 19th C. cock pit:  steep banks of backless benches around a really very small central circle.  Below is a green oilcloth.  Above is an octagonal flourescent light fixture of unforgiving and unvarying brightness.  On one side sits a stocky woman in an oxford-cloth shirt and a vest with a prompt book and a buzzer, which she sounds at the end of each scene, or round.

Two men enter from opposite sides of the ring.  One is dark, built, 30ish, with one of those faces that can skip from scorn to anxiety to frozen rage in a heartbeat.  The other is fairer, slighter, looks 20-something but is probably older, possessed of remarkable cheekbones, puppy eyes, and an air of slightly vague sweetness that, frighteningly, doesn't vary even when he's saying something neither vague nor sweet.  It is immediately apparent that these two have been living together for some time, that the dark one (M) is happy with the relationship, and that the fair one (John, the only named character) is sorta, kinda, well, not exactly not happy, but maybe a little restless?  Dissatisfied?  Uncomfortable?  He doesn't really know.  But whatever it is, it makes him leave M by the second buzzer--for a couple of weeks, anyway.  During which he meets, and arguably falls in love with, a young woman (W), with whom he has surprisingly glorious sex, who treats him like an adult (as M does not), who offers him a future of marriage and vine-covered cottages and children and Christmas dinners (which M most certainly does not).  Who, in turn, he leaves for M, who he still loves.  And quarrels with.  And can't stop telling about W and how much he loves her.

Just when I was starting to think M was going to kill John just to get him to shut up, he surprised me by inviting her to dinner.  And his father, so he'd have someone there on his side in case (!) things got weird.  And then things got weird.  But not in any of the ways I thought they would.

It was certainly an interesting play.  A great deal of it is about the ways people talk to each other, what they listen to and what they ignore, how they try and fail (or succeed) in manipulating each other.  M has a great line in clever-boots sarcasm, which is simultaneously hilarious and slightly cringe-worthy.  W is nice to an almost supernatural degree, with just enough no-nonsense frankness to keep her from floating off the stage on a pink, fluffy cloud.  She suffers from being slightly more of a polemical position than a real character, though Amanda Quaid works hard to give her true humanity. Similarly, M's father (F), is not altogether convincing.  He's a useful fourth in the complex dance that is the closing bout of the cock fight, but that's pretty much all he is.

M and John, on the other hand, are very real indeed.  And Jason Butler Harner and Cory Michael Smith do them proud.  I've heard fights like theirs.  I've participated in fights like theirs (not in the last 20 years, I hasten to say).  Even though the putative subject of their quarrels--as of the play--is John's sexual identity and, more fundamentally, whether homosexuality is a choice or a destiny, finally, what I was most touched by was its more generally human concerns.  What is love, and how do you know you're in it?  What is normal, and who gets to define it?  How on earth can you choose between two loved, but mutually exclusive objects?

In the end, Mike Bartlett leaves the answer to that last question pretty much up in the air.  I can see how he got to where he did--he just followed the pattern he'd set up to its strictly logical conclusion.  It was absolutely satisfying intellectually.  But it wasn't particularly satisfying emotionally.  Which was his point, and on one level just as it should be.  But the effect was finally a little itch-you-can't-quite-reachish.  And I really wish he'd given W a little more real depth and complexity.  But these are personal quibbles.  It's a fine play.  It makes you laugh and it makes you think--always a good combination.  I recommend it highly.

We have a friend in town from Paris.  She's a medievalist, specializing in the prose Alexander and the way Alexander the Great was depicted in illustrations of the same.  We went to her thesis defense in Paris a few years ago, which was a whole lot more scary than mine was, I'm here to tell you.  Lasted almost all day, open to the public, and the hall was PACKED--must have been more than a hundred people there.  She knows all there is to know about Medieval art, and going to Ste Chapelle or Notre Dame or Cluny with her is an education all in itself.  She's also an enthusiastic dancer and a not-so-secret Lover of Musicals.

Which is why we've been to two in two days, er, nights.

For some reason, LJ lost the second half of my review of "Anything Goes."  I can't recapture it, but I do want to say that I loved Joel Grey, who played Moonface Martin as Mark Rylance in Boeing-Boeing:  wry, slightly bewildered, clear-eyed (even when drunk), and oddly, primally innocent.  In many ways, it's a very innocent play, despite the hymn of praise to Public Enemy #1, another to sleeping around ("Buddy Beware"), a nightclub singer who used to be an evangelist, some very sexy angels, an (almost) forced marriage, an implied dog-drowning, and assorted sketchy priests, captains (of industry and ocean liners) and concupiscent sailors.  Everybody's a con man of one kind or another, hiding a secret past, passion, or dream.  And yet, they are cheerful, forward-looking, (except for the ingenue, the incongruously-named Hope, who despairs at the drop of a hat), and damned fine dancers.

I think it must be the music.  Porter is at his wry, cheerfully cynical best in songs like "You're the Top" (one of my favorite songs in the world) and "Friendship" and "I Get A Kick Out Of You."  And "Blow, Gabriel, Blow" made me cry, solely and entirely because of how it was used in the wonderful Porter bio-pic "De-Lovely," which you should all rent IMMEDIATELY if not sooner, because So Very Good.

OK, that's mostly what I said (except for something exceptionally clever about Joel Grey's silly duet in the second act with a blue follow-spot playing a bluebird singing "tweet-tweet", which is lost in the mists of whatever, and a tolerably lyrical description of the Act I finale tapstravaganza "Anything Goes."  Ah, well.  Sic Transit Verbum LJ.)


In short, this is no play for a feminist.  It is, apparently, a play for fans of Nick Jonas, who has replaced Harry Potter Daniel Radcliff as J. Pierrepont Finch (call me Ponty).  The audience was full of 20-somethings in very short dresses and very high heels, who practically fainted en masse when he came on.  He is actually great in the part--perky, energetic, arrogant, an extremely flexible dancer, and a fine, strong singer with excellent elocution.  Of the rest of the cast, I loved Beau Bridges as J.B. Biggley, the philandering, old-school-tie-obsessed, knitting president of the World Wide Wicket corporation.  And Stephanie Rothenberg (who comes to Broadway from a career as a Disney voice actress), who gives the model secretary/love-interest/doormat character a certain Giselle (from Disney's Enchanted) wide-eyed charm.  The chorus was dynamite, the choreography a lot wittier than the lyrics, the costumes pitch-perfect early 60's.  My favorite part of the set was the backdrop of the early 60's Midtown skyline, including the Pan Am Building (where my father worked) and the Chrysler Building (where he worked before the Pan Am Building was built), and a building that looked like a honeycomb I recognize, but don't know the name of. 

And that's it, really.  Except for a short irritation break over the fact that the preceding two paragraphs are in Italics, despite my best efforts to make them Roman.

"In olden days, a glimpse of stocking was looked on as something shocking.  Now, god knows:  Anything Goes!"

Well, almost.  Even the heavily re-written book we saw last night revolves about a marriage plot, (or two, or three) and the booty calls are all by Moonface Martin's hot redheaded sidekick, Erma (or Oima, in Joel Grey's on-again-off-again Bronxese).  Not a four-letter word in sight, either.  Plenty of ankles, though.  And calves and knees and thighs of inordinate length, and twitching backsides, male and female.  The keynotes of the evening were innuendo, double-entendre, and a double helping of joy de vivre, all ending up in multiple marriage bells and a grand tap-dancing finale.

My scholar's heart would love to do a comparative reading of the original play and this reboot (with, I doubt not, new songs swiped from other, more forgettable Cole Porter musicals).  But since I don't know the original, I can't do that.  I can tell you that I was pleasantly surprised by Act I, which makes sense (for some alternate value of "sense") once you accept the utterly unlikely plot premises.  Act II (featuring a dream sequence in the brig with a blue follow-spot playing a bluebird and a completely unlikely tent revival/revue number involving an entire ship-load of idiots passengers randomly confessing their sins to a bunch of hootchie-cootchie dancers, fell apart entirely.  But by that time, nobody cared.  We'd seen the astonishing tour-de-force of stagecraft and dancing that was the Act I closer, and we were ready to swallow anything, as long as it had plenty of sequins in it.

Which is pretty much what we got.  Yes, we missed Sutton Foster as Reno Sweeney, but Stephanie J. Block was energetic, sexy, and a helluva good dancer and singer.  She did the tough-girl nightclub singer schitk a treat.

If any of you follow me on Twitter or Facebook, and have happened to open your browsers when I was posting, over the past month or so, you'll have heard me whinging mightily about a certain story that refused to Come Right.  Well, it did, finally, and I handed it in, and it was bought, and will appear in Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling's anthology Queen Victoria's Book of Spells.

Here is the TOC.  As you can see, it's a star-studded cast.  Kathe Koja!  Dora Goss!  Jeffrey Ford!  Cat Valente!  Elizabeth Wein!  Genevieve Valentine!  Veronica Schanoes!  Greg Maguire!  Oh, just EVERYBODY!

Tor hasn't announced a pub date as yet.  But believe me, I'll let you know as soon as I do.  I SOOOOO can't wait to read this. 

Preface Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling
Introduction Terri Windling
The Fairy Enterprise by Jeffrey Ford
From the Catalogue of the Pavilion of the Uncanny and Marvelous, Scheduled for Premiere at the Great Exhibition (Before the Fire) by Genevieve Valentine
The Memory Book by Maureen McHugh
Queen Victoria’s Book of Spells by Delia Sherman
La Reine D’Enfer by Kathe Koja
For the Briar Rose by Elizabeth Wein
The Governess by Elizabeth Bear
Smithfield by James P. Blaylock
The Unwanted Women of Surrey by Kaaron Warren
Charged by Leanna Renee Hieber
Mr. Splitfoot by Dale Bailey
Phosphorus by Veronica Schanoes
We Without Us Were Shadows by Catherynne M. Valente
The Vital Importance of the Superficial by Ellen Kushner and Caroline Stevermer
The Jewel in the Toad Queen’s Crown by Jane Yolen
A Few Twigs He Left Behind by Gregory Maguire
Their Monstrous Minds by Tanith Lee
Estella Saves the Village by Theodora Goss

ETfix horrible Freudian slip I didn't even notice until two people pointed it out.  And to add apologies.